Digital Camera Setting Suggestions – Part 2 of 2

Continued from Part 1 on Monday, April 9, 2012

Macro Mode Setting – Icon is usually a flower symbol and this setting helps you take really great close-ups that are sharp, clear and bright, but slightly blur the background. And because most macro modes disable the zoom you have to “physically” get pretty close to what you are shooting.. Don't use macro mode for people, unless you're focusing on fine detail, such as an up-close picture of an eye

Program Mode Setting – Icon is usually a P and this is a great setting because although some setting remain “automatic” you can now control the three most important settings: flash, ISO value and white balance

Saturation Settings, which are found in the Main Menu, usually under “color mode” – be careful with this one because if you move it too much your pictures will have a hazy quality to them…

Sunset Mode Setting – More and more digital camera’s today have a sunset mode setting, which adds more warmth (or orange tones) to photos we take. It can brighten up a sunset, so try this setting

White Balance or WB Setting -  give us the ability to adjust the color of the picture. Most digital cameras are preset to “automatic white balance” or “AWB”. But you might want to experiment a little and set the white balance to manual, so that you can adjust the balance for certain lighting – you can usually do this by pressing and holding the White Balance/WB button and rotating the dial to choose: tungsten light, fluorescent light; sun light, cloudy light, light bulb, flash light etc so that the camera will adjust the color to get the color of the picture exactly the way that you wanted

Remember, with websites like  www.youtube.com and www.ehow.com and those for your specific cameras, you can find print and video tutorials that will help you master each and every aspect of your digital camera…  In the meantime, here are some highlights of some of the standard settings for most digital cameras – remember experiment and play with your camera – it’s the best way to learn…